dolorosa_12 | Entries tagged with robert macfarlane

It's been a weekend of contrasts: Saturday was busy and full of people, with a trip into Cambridge to run several errands and go to the Mill Road Winter Fair, which was back after two years' hiatus due to the pandemic. This is one of my favourite regional events — it takes place on a long street in Cambridge which is home to most of the city's international grocery stores, a bunch of restaurants and cafes from South, Southeast and East Asia, Turkey, the Middle East and North Africa, as well as various Italian delis and independent cafes. The street gets pedestrianised, there are parades and live music, and all the cafes, shops and restaurants sell food from stalls outside their front doors. Even if a shop isn't one that sells food, they tend to set up stalls selling things like mulled wine, sweets or baked goods, or even more elaborate street food for the day. We were spoilt for choice when it came to lunch, cobbling a meal together from several different food trucks, and drinking mulled wine as we wandered up and down the road.

Sunday was a much more typical affair for our household, with all the usual activities: swimming when the pool opened at 8am (with a cold walk home enlivened by various cats sitting in windows and a flock of swallows swooping back and forth across the morning sky, making a sound like gently-breaking waves in a quiet bay), stewed fruit and crepes cooked to the soundtrack of a Massive Attack album, writing Yuletide fic while the biathlon played in the background. I've just come back downstairs after doing my normal Sunday evening yoga, a stretchy slow flow to calm my typical end of the weekend anxiety.

fandomtrees has a few days to go before it closes for sign ups. My tree is here, and I'd definitely recommend this fest as a low-pressure opportunity to create some fanworks, and hopefully get some nice ones of your own.

Robert Macfarlane's love of The Dark Is Rising is something I've always found very pleasing: I knew and enjoyed his nature writing before I knew we shared a love of Susan Cooper's children's books, and always felt he looked at the landscape with a similar eye to that of Cooper. So when I heard he was involved with a radio drama adaptation of the second book in the series, to be released around the same time of year as the story takes place, I was delighted. He's talked a bit more about his relationship with the books in a newspaper article for The Guardian.

I've just read one book since my last log — Servant Mage (Kate Elliott), the first in a novella duology. I'm not sure whether it can be described as 'epic fantasy' due to its brevity, but it certainly has that scale in terms of its sense of the sweep of history, violent shifts in politics, simmering revolutionary movements, and the interaction between the supernatural and people's everyday lives. All Elliott's strengths as a writer are on display here: comprehensive and well thought through worldbuilding, an emphasis on power relations and the terror and destruction wrought by those with social standing on those who lack power (and the foolish lies the powerful enforce in order to maintain their position), and a sense of people and societies grappling with vast, rapid political upheaval and social change. Elliott always has an interest in writing about what happens after the revolution succeeds, or the prophesied chosen one claims his kingdom, or the 'bad' monarch is replaced by the 'good' — she's never been satisfied with the standard fantasy trilogy closure, only with genuine justice. I'm looking forward to the sequel.

This is definitely a night to light a fire in the woodburning stove and burrow under one of the throw rugs — proper The Dark Is Rising weather, although hopefully not with the corresponding supernatural onslaught!

It's been a rather video-heavy weekend. Yesterday, I had the online graduation for the postgraduate certificate in teaching that I completed last year. Originally, this was meant to be an in-person graduation in May, at which I had elected to graduate in absentia. (To be perfectly honest, being there in person seemed a disproportionate amount of effort relative to the personal importance the qualification held to me.) But given the ceremony ended up being a prerecorded online event, I decided to 'attend'. What this meant in practice: sitting in leggings and lopapeysa in the living room, drinking tea, and skipping the parts of the ceremony irrelevant to me. I could get used to this style of graduation!

Several hours later, Matthias and I Zoomed in for the alumni event at the department where I did my postgraduate studies (and where he did undergraduate and postgraduate degrees). This event usually involves hanging around in the departmental common room, eating chips (crisps), drinking cheap wine, and listening to brief presentations from faculty members about their current research. Over the years, the number of friends among the alumni who still live in Cambridge has dwindled, and therefore we've rarely seen anyone we know. But because this event was online, we got to see friends in Vienna, London, Anglesey, Tübingen, and Utrecht, in addition to faculty, and it ended up being a nice way to catch up. We didn't get a chance to talk to everyone, as the organisers wisely decided not to have a thirty-person free-for-all, but rather split us into breakout rooms of three or four people.

Further online social events are on the horizon: I missed an event at which Roshani Chokshi was in conversation with SA Chakraborty to launch her new book, as it streamed live in the middle of the night in my timezone, but thankfully it's now been uploaded to Youtube. (I'm just trying to decide whether to finish the last thirty per cent of the book — which is excellent — before watching the video.)

I've also signed up for the virtual launch event for Robert Macfarlane's new book. As Macfarlane lives in my timezone (indeed he lives in my city), this is taking place at the much more civilised time of 7pm on Thursday. If anyone else is interested, you can register here (it's free, but you need to 'buy' a ticket in order to get the Zoom link).

Given my job involves teaching via videoconferencing software, and loads of other virtual meetings, I need to remember not to overdo this sort of thing in my spare time, as it can become very draining on top of the hours of Zooming and Teamsing for work, but at the moment it's pretty manageable. There are a lot of things I hope remain the norm long after we emerge on the other side of the pandemic tunnel, and above all I hope we retain a certain degree of online conferences, workshops, conventions, book festivals and book launches. They're so much more comfortable to attend, a lot of them are free, and the lack of cost and travel opens them up to a much wider audience than in-person events make possible. You lose all the in-person spontaneous networking, but in some ways I think that's a good thing.

It's growing significantly colder here (which inevitably coincided with our boiler having a hissy fit; I think we've fixed it by bleeding the radiators), and the grim greyness and gales of wind certainly didn't encourage me to go outdoors. That made it the perfect time to curl up with lots of virtual social events, get my Yuletide nominations in, and catch up on a bunch of Dreamwidth comments. Sometimes, that's a nice way to spend the weekend.

This week's linkpost is up a bit early, and contains many fabulous things.

I'm a huge fan of Sophia McDougall's review of Birdman: over at Strange Horizons. In it, she compares the film to Boris Johnson. It's an apt comparison.

Here's a great interview with Samantha Shannon. 'Cities are made of narrative' indeed.

Aliette de Bodard's description of her subconscious as a library is a fabulous metaphor, and one that I might steal myself!

There's a great set of guest posts over at Ladybusiness on 'What books are on your auto-recommend list?' (For the record, mine are the His Dark Materials trilogy by Philip Pullman, the Pagan Chronicles series by Catherine Jinks, Space Demons, Skymaze, Shinkei and Galax Arena by Gillian Rubinstein, Parkland, Earthsong, Fire Dancer and The Beast of Heaven by Victor Kelleher, the Romanitas trilogy by Sophia McDougall and the Crossroads trilogy by Kate Elliott.)

Episode 4 of Fangirl Happy Hour is up. This week Ana and Renay are talking Karen Memory by Elizabeth Bear, Jupiter Ascending and Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.. I'm not quite as critical of S.H.I.E.L.D. as they are, while I think there's room for difference of opinion about the feminism of Jupiter Ascending, but as always, I appreciate their thoughts.

The first few guest posts about representation and diversity are up on Jim C. Hines' blog.

Shannon Hale talks about gender segregation at readings she's done at schools. It's heartbreaking.

I thoroughly enjoyed this article by Robert Macfarlane about language and landscape. Beautiful stuff.

I really liked the recent BBC adaptation of Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall. This interview by Julia Raeside of Claire Foy, who played Anne Boleyn, goes a long way towards explaining why.

For reasons that will soon become apparent, although I can't provide a link to it, the #readingAuthorName hashtag on Twitter has been a powerful and positive movement. It works like this: think of an author whose works moved you and shaped you into the person you are. Tweet about it. Add the hashtag #readingAuthorName (obviously replacing AuthorName for the author's actual name). Feel happy.